Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Caroline Dinenage

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is important that the levies are imposed only on venues that supply alcohol between midnight and 6 am. That means the responsible pubs and clubs that shut earlier and are managed well, are able to go about their business without any such levies. The funds generated by the levy will be payable to the police and crime commissioners to help to fund the necessary policing, as well as to other organs of local government that address the effects of alcohol-related crime and disorder.

Another positive outcome of the Bill is the reduction in centrally set targets and in bureaucracy. The mass data collection prescribed by the previous Government is one of the biggest frustrations for our police. In Hampshire, it amounts to 130 weeks’ worth of extra work per year—two full-time members of staff—just to satisfy the demands of the Home Office. And I have no idea who reads all that stuff. The plea from local police is that this great advance towards common-sense policing needs to be reflected in changes to the criminal justice system. At the moment, our police spend thousands of hours preparing court cases in which the perpetrator says nothing on arrest or at interview but pleads guilty in the Crown court. All the preparation work was therefore an utter bureaucratic waste of time. There has to be some way of mitigating that.

Hampshire has the sixth biggest force in the country, policing about 2 million people, and substantially more during the summer.

[Chris Bryant]

Is the hon. Lady really suggesting that police officers should not do any preparation because they think that someone might plead guilty? What then happens when the person does not plead guilty?

[Caroline Dinenage]

I suggest that far too much police time is spent preparing for an inevitable guilty plea.

[Chris Bryant]

Why is it inevitable?

[Caroline Dinenage]

Well, in some cases it is an inevitable guilty plea. It is thousands of police hours—not in every case, but in many.

There are clear benefits from increased collaboration between forces, not least improved efficiency, the driving down of costs and the avoidance of reinventing the wheel. Police forces can do a lot by sharing back-office functions and procurement. In Hampshire constabulary there will be collaboration with the neighbouring Thames Valley force on facilities such as dog teams, firearms response, IT and surveillance aircraft.

We also need to ensure that the collegiate approach is backed up with shared local information. So many times, the police talk of the frustrations of the record management system, with local criminal information not being available across county borders, which the bad guys are happy to exploit.

There is a tendency for people to view the police as “them and us,” but the police are us; the us that is prepared to deal with humanity at its worst. As both Robert Peel and the Home Secretary have said,

“The police are the public and the public are the police.”

In Gosport, our local police work hard to build up trust in traditionally wary neighbourhoods. The Bill starts to recognise that work and build on it, and is joined up in both its approach and its delivery.